


Friendship is Signing Casts

by miss_nettles_wife



Category: Eerie Indiana: The Other Dimension
Genre: Friendship, Gen, interospection, minor injury, robot death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 16:21:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18450215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_nettles_wife/pseuds/miss_nettles_wife
Summary: Rodney signs Mitchell's cast after he breaks his leg in a fight with Robo! Rodney.





	Friendship is Signing Casts

**Author's Note:**

> have you accepted Rodney Covington as your lord and savior yet?

“Sorry about Robot Rodney.”  Real Rodney said, as he sat down next to Mitchell.  
  
“Oh, it’s okay.” Mitchell said, looking up from his notepad. He was always a diligent note taker, when Rodney had to repeat the grade, his notes had taken him from an F to a B. His parents had been ecstatic.  
  
“Stanley says you really liked him.”  
  
“I guess so.” Mitchell said, and Rodney noted that he has a freckle on his left cheek that he’s never noticed. Well, he’d noticed but never noticed noticed. If he’d had to fill out a missing persons report for him, he wouldn’t have thought to include it.  
  
He really must be in it now, he thought to himself as he sat down on a large green beanbag he was eighty percent sure was not likely to swallow him whole. He sunk through to almost the bottom and right away he felt the tiny beads digging into the back of his legs and he was sitting almost on the floor. He hesitated, but it was a pretty usual experience of sitting on any beanbag, Mitchells or otherwise.  
  
“How is your leg?”  
  
“It’s okay.”  
  
“That’s good. “  
  
Sometimes, it was easy to forget that Mitchell was still just a teenager. That he was just as squishy and breakable as any other teenager. Sometimes, when it came to weirdness solving, it was like he had some kind of guardian angel, or perhaps he was just very lucky. He faced off with death, or at least maiming, weekly. He’s fought against brain washing, bullies and a crazed cable guy and come out more or less unscathed. It made when he sustain an injury, all the more jarring.  
  
“The doctor said that they’ll take the cast off in a month or so.”  
  
Rodney had broken his arm in the second grade when he fell from a tree. His parents had been furious at him. He’d ended up disposing of it years later but his cast had so many drawings and signatures on it that there was hardly and white left at the end. Of course, being himself; he’d taken a great deal of enjoyment out of people doing stuff for him. He looked down at Mitchell’s cast. On it there were five signatures  
  
Stanley, in green marker  
Kari, in pink gel pen  
His parents, both in black marker  
And Mr Crawford, in orange.  
And that was all.  
  
He knew Mitchell didn’t have many friends, but was that really all?  
  
He knew there were people he knew, like Holly Hepburn and Ollie, but they hadn’t signed. In fact, he didn’t really remember seeing them with Mitchell at school. When Mitchell finally got to have lunch with the big kids, as they were called, he didn’t ever recall anyone else sitting with them.  
  
For some reason, he’d never thought about it. He just thought Mitchell was putting aside his friends to hang out with Rodney, not that Rodney was the only one he had to pick from.  
  
Then he had another, more troubling thought. Did _he_ have more than five people to sign his cast, these days? He’d stopped spending time with his old friends in order to spend more time with Mitchell and Stanley. After he came back, when the motorbike thing didn’t work out, he’d done his best to slot back into his old life.  
  
But his old friends didn’t seem the same. Now he’d noticed the weirdness of Eerie, he couldn’t un-notice it. If he’d been so invested, he supposed he could have pretended. Become just like the adults in their world who knew the evils of Eerie but didn’t do anything. Like Mayor Carver who let children be eaten by the monster in Lake Eerie, or Mr Crawford, who valued money over people.  
  
But he didn’t want to.  
  
So he’d detached himself. He’d shifted away from his family and started spending his weekends at the Taylor house. He’d left his old friends at their parties in favor of sitting on Mitchell’s couch and watching Lieutenant Lewinski re-runs.  It stayed apparent to him that he wasn’t Rodney the Rebel anymore. He was Rodney the Weird Guy. Like Mitchell and Stanley. People tolerate weird fourteen year olds, weird sixteen year olds are less beloved.  
  
“Rodney?”  
  
“Huh?” He asked, looking up from Mitchell’s cast and at his face. He hadn’t realized he’d stopped paying attention.  
  
“I asked if you really hit him with your motorbike or if Stanley is making it up.”  
  
“I hit him.” He confirmed, settling back. “I didn’t want to, but-”  
  
“He was a danger to Stanley.”  
  
“And Eerie as a whole.” He offered, not sure why he felt compelled to justify hitting a crazed robot.  
  
When he’d set out on his great motorbike tour of the world, he never did intend to come back to Eerie. He hated this town, he hated his family and he hated this school. Looking back, he was an idiot for thinking he could do it without some kind of income. Sure, he could work odd jobs when they came around; in fact, that had been his plan. But odd jobs didn’t come around nearly as frequently as they did the movies.  
  
When he finally got back to Eerie; down his last dollar, Mitchell hadn’t even recognize him. When he got a look at himself in the Taylor family bathroom he hadn’t recognized himself. He looked better now he’d gotten some sleep and ate decent food. Mostly, he’d done it at the Taylor house. As much as he’d tried to convince himself that it didn’t matter his parents favoured a robot over him, it still stung a bit.  
  
Okay. It stung a lot. HIs parents should have loved him regardless but instead they prefered a robot whose primary purpose was making money and getting good grades. They were so disappointed when he fell back into how he used to be, averaging Cs and riding his motorbike. HIs mother asked him all the time what happened to her special boy who went to JA. He can’t answer in a way she’d believe so he says nothing.  
  
He had to get rid of the robot him. WIth the help of Mitchell and Stanley, of course. In his defense, up until a couple of days ago, he’d believed that they had. What he hadn’t believed was that a robot could develop sentience and attempt to murder the people who had, slowly and painfully, become his closest friends.  
  
They’d put him in the school basement and well, they’d forgotten about him. What was there to remember? That for about five months Rodney had been replaced by a robot? A robot that Mitchell seemed to have a level of fondness for? No one would believe that. It happened to him, and he only barely believed it.  
  
When he first learned that Robo Rodney had escaped the school basement where they’d hidden him he’d been afraid, thought of what he isn’t sure. Perhaps the premise on its own is scary, after all: what if that thing killed someone? Whats worse; what if he was blamed for it? What’s his defense in court? Your honor, I didn’t kill that man, it was a robot made by a crazy man who kept me strapped to a table for two days. No I am not crazy. Yeah; right.  
  
He did know one thing, though. When that machine hurt Mitchell, when it pushed him out of that window, he wasn’t scared. He was angry. He was seeing red dots around the outside of his vision, even as he was using a payphone to call an ambulance. When the thing tried to hurt Stanley, he lost control of his body and destroyed it without a second thought.  
  
A hand sat on Mitchell’s table, with a long piece of twine around it’s wrist, detailing its number, and location. Rodney’s hand, he thought. An exact replica of his own.  
  
“Anyway. Why are you here?”  
  
“Can’t I just come to see my friend?”  
  
“We’re friends?”  
  
“I thought we were.”  
  
Mitchell gave him one of those indecipherable looks he’s so good at. For someone who wore their love on their outsides, Mitchell was difficult to get a beat on sometimes. He wondered if that was what investigating Eerie did to you. But all the same, he didn’t seem upset but the notion. Just...Confused.  
“I’ve never had a lot of friends before.” He told Rodney, “Just Stanley, for the most part.”  
  
“How come?”  
  
“I don’t know. I suppose they thought I was strange.” He admitted, “Even before I started noticing all the weird stuff in this town. I just...Didn’t fit in with my peers, and I was too old for Stanley’s peers so...It was just me most of the time.”  
  
“I’m sorry.” He said, not knowing what else to say. He’d never not had friends. He’d never had any close friends, friends he could rely on and tell stuff too, but he’d never been lonely. Not like how Mitchell was describing.  
  
“Don’t be. My Mom always says it’s better to have a few close friends than a lot of okay ones.”  
  
Mary Ann Taylor was a smart woman. You didn’t have to know her personally to know that. She was known more than anything for her job at the Nuclear plant and it was his understanding that she’d saved the day from total meltdown on multiple occasions. She never struck him as someone with a lot of friends; she was just like most incredibly smart people that he knew. Only able to communicate with other very smart people. Like Mr Taylor. Of course she would repeat the old saying about friends. She probably didn’t have any.  
  
When he was a kid, he thought it was a load of rubbish. Now, he wasn’t so sure.  
  
“Was Robo Rodney your friend?”  
  
“I ‘spose, but…” He frowned and considered his next word choice before speaking “Not the way you are.”    
  
“In the way I am?”  
  
“Yeah. Robo Rodney was funny to mess with...But he was also a robot.”  
  
“How do you know I’m not a robot?”  
  
“I’ve seen you cut yourself shaving. Robots don't have blood.” Mitchell informed him.  
  
“Yet.” He replied, as ominous as he could.  
  
“Yet.” Mitchell agreed.  
  
“Hey, can I sign your cast?” He asked, fishing a pen out of his school bag. Mitchell beamed at him. It’s a smile Rodney could stand to see a lot more often.  
  
“Sure!”  
  
Rodney let Mitchell put his leg up in his lap and then wrote on it ‘Get well soon, from your (second) best friend, Rodney’  
  
If Mitchell had an objection, he didn’t voice it. Instead, he invited Rodney to stay for dinner.  
  
  
  


 


End file.
